States

Parents

Environmental education encompasses basic as well as scientific knowledge regarding the cheetah and its survival. This targets professionals, farmers, students and local communities, and instilling national pride and recognition.
Chris Gordon comment: You are probably talking about 2000 farmers from this area, and CCF covers 300 per year. There is also training from Agra and other organisations, I would say possible 20% coverage.

States

Involves both livestock and wildlife management in a more sustainable way, meeting both the needs of people and wildlife. Practices involves herding (herd dogs, herder, donkeys etc.) kraaling, calving seasons, maternity camps, vacination against infectious diseases just to mention a few.

States

Parents

Amount of palatable plant biomass being available for cheetah's prey.
Assuming here that plant biomass is the most important habitat variable for herbivores - acknowledging that this is quite simplified.

States

Parents

Successful pregnancies + survival of born cubs to adulthood.
Underlying assumption: about 95% of removed cheetahs by humans are males. Thus, there is a negligable impact from the node cheetah removal to recruitment, since only 5% of mothers will be affected by the removal.
Stress level as a direct impact on recruitment was not taken into account because of controversial literature on the direct effect of stress on fertility.
(output node)

Name

= Recruitment

Label

= Recruitment

Type

= Discrete Labelled Node

States

increased

: No description

decreased

: No description

Parents

Cheetah removal (input node from Human factors
)
Cheetahs are not killed in a random way. Farmer mainly set box traps at marking trees, where mainly (about 95%) males get caught and killed. Most of these males probably are the resindet males defending the marking trees. This is relavent for the node 'female mate choice'.

The number of males with different genetic outfits from which a female can choose a mate partner.
Underlying assumption (derived from the Serengeti study Gottelli at al 2007): females prefer males with a territory. For Namibia this means that females prefer males using a small range around marking tree clusters these males are in a better health status than other males, unpublished data Wachter et al). These males are also the males the farmers are more likely to kill when setting traps at marking trees, so the farmers provoke a higher turnover of males females prefer to mate.

Name

= FemaleMateChoice

Label

= Female mate choice

Type

= Discrete Labelled Node

States

increase

: No description

decrease

: No description

Parents

Absence of genetic defects (caused by load of deleterious alleles in the gene pool, and critcally low functional genetic diversity).
Impact of genetic defects is negligeable based on field data despite low genetic diversity.
Impact of cheetah removal has a direct negative and indirect positive (via female mate choice) effect. The direct negative effect refes to a decreasing gene pool with decreasing number of individuals and the indirect positive effect refers to an increased female mate choice due to higher male turnover by male removals. The positive effect is assessed to be stronger than the negative effect. Chance that males are killed is high (about 95%).